Supporting Artists
The streaming math doesn't work
Here's the reality: most artists make almost nothing from streaming. The average payout is somewhere around $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. For an independent artist with 100,000 monthly listeners — which is genuinely impressive — that works out to maybe $400 a month. Before taxes. Before the distributor takes their cut.
It's gotten so bad that artists are going back to selling physical copies of their music on USB sticks at shows, because that $10 handoff at a merch table pays more than thousands of streams ever will. The internet was supposed to democratize music. Instead, it created a system where only the top fraction of a percent can sustain a career from their recordings alone.
What if speculation could fund artists?
That's the premise of this project. People already speculate on artists — who's going to blow up, who's falling off, who's underrated. It happens on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, group chats. What if that energy could actually pay the artists being talked about?
Tastemakers is a prediction market where every trade generates a fee, and half of that fee goes directly to the artist's wallet. Not to a label. Not to an intermediary. To them, on-chain, instantly. The more people trade on an artist's market, the more that artist earns.
Symbiosis, not extraction
Most crypto projects that touch music are extractive — they ask artists to mint something, sell something, promote something. We wanted to try the opposite. Artists don't need to do anything. They don't need to sign up, mint an NFT, or even know this exists. Their market gets created based on public streaming data, and they start earning the moment someone makes a trade.
The idea is that speculation and public goods don't have to be opposites. Speculators get a market they care about with real outcomes tied to real data. Artists get a new revenue stream funded entirely by the activity of their fans and the broader market. Fans get to put their taste where their mouth is and directly support artists they believe in.
A digital public utility
We think of Tastemakers as a kind of digital public utility — a piece of infrastructure that connects artists, fans, and speculators in a way that benefits all three. The smart contracts are on Base (an Ethereum L2), the streaming data comes from verified oracles, and the fee split is hardcoded — nobody can change it or take a bigger cut later.
This is what crypto is supposed to be good at: creating systems where the rules are transparent, the incentives are aligned, and the value flows to the people who create it. We wanted to build one example of that actually working.
How the money flows
Every trade on a market generates a 1% fee. That fee is split 50/50:
0.5%
Direct to artist
0.5%
Platform operations
So if $10,000 is traded on an artist's market over a month, that artist earns $50 without lifting a finger. Scale that across hundreds of markets with active trading, and it starts to matter — especially for smaller artists where every dollar counts.
Verify it yourself
The fee logic is in the smart contract, on-chain, readable by anyone. Here's the TastemakerHub contract where all trades and fee distributions happen:
View TastemakerHub on BaseScanTrade on an artist you believe in
Every prediction you make directly supports the artist.
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